Currently, personal cleaning liquids, such as liquid soap, shampoo, antibacterial liquids, disinfectant liquids, liquid dishwashing detergents and other sanitization fluids, are typically applied in full strength and thereafter diluted and rinsed with water. One drawback of the current practice is that personal care liquids are often stored at random locations, and are difficult to find. Another drawback is that the use of personal care liquids during a regiment, such as washing hands, varies greatly among individuals. Another drawback is that people may merely rinse their hands with water and not use the personal care liquids as should be during as prescribed washing regiment. This can be especially troublesome in certain industries such as, food preparation and food serving, child care, medical care, and other service-based industries. Another drawback is that in systems that utilize dispensers for personal care liquids that are located adjacent the washbasin, the personal care liquid tends to become caked within the washbasin and on the surrounding surfaces, whether it be by leakage from the dispenser and/or as a result of the user's interaction with the dispenser and/or the washbasin.
In an attempt to facilitate hand washing and eliminate the above-mentioned dispenser that dispense undiluted personal care liquids directly to the user, several systems have been developed that dispense a mixture of water and a personal care liquids (such as liquid soap) have been proposed. Examples of such systems are disclosed in: (1) U.S. Pat. No. 7,073,215, issued Jul. 11, 2006 to Berke et al.; (2) U.S. Patent Application Publication No. 2009/0000024, published Jan. 1, 2009 to Louis et al.:, (3) U.S. Pat. No. 5,906,319, issued May 25, 1999 to Crowl et al.; (4) U.S. Pat. No. 6,125,482, issued Oct. 3, 2000 to Foster; (5) U.S. Pat. No. 4,248,266, issued Feb. 3, 1981 to Queen; and (6) U.S. Patent Application Publication No. 2006/0101575, issued May 18, 2006 to Louis.
While the above-referenced systems, methods and apparatus are an improvement over standard operation in which water is dispensed from a faucet and the personal care liquid is dispensed separately, each of these systems, methods and apparatus suffer from a number of drawbacks. Such drawbacks include complexity of the fluid circuits and associated components, excessive requirements of electrical power, and/or inability to create a reliable and consistent proportion of personal care liquid to water in the mixture. Moreover, many, if not all, of these systems fail to properly compensate for upstream pressure variances, thereby resulting in said complexity and or unpredictable results.
The present invention seeks to solve these and other deficiencies and provide an improved system, apparatus and method for creating and/or dispensing a mixture of water and a personal care liquid, such as soap, shampoo, antibacterial liquids, disinfectant liquids, liquid dishwashing detergents, or other sanitization